Sort By Soundex (or similar) `Closeness`

Is there any way to have MySQL order results by how close they 'sound' to a search term?

I'm trying to order fields that contain user input of city names. Variations and misspellings exist, and I'd like to show the 'closest' matches at the top.

I know soundex may not be the best algorithm for this, but if it (or another method开发者_JS百科) could be reasonable successful - it may be worth having the sorting done by the database.

Soundex is no good for this sort of thing because different words can give you the same Soundex results and will therefore sort arbitrarily. A better solution for this is the Levenshein Edit Distance algorithm and you may be able to implement it as a function in your database: Link to Levensheint impl. as MySql stored function!!!

You can also check out this SO link. It contains a Sql server (T-SQL-specific) implementation of the algorithm but it should be possible to port. The mechanics of the algorithm are fairly simple needing only a 2D array and looping over string.